-- According to Thunberg, the Hottentots being very little acquainted with agriculture, or with the use of the cerealia, and subsisting principally upon wild bulbs and fruits, obtain food also from _Encephalartos caffer_, a species of _Zamia_, with a cylindrical trunk, the thickness of a man's body, and about seven feet high.

As, however, I do not know whether these cerealia were grown as productive crops, much stress cannot be laid upon the fact of their having been cultivated, for in a great many parts of Tibet the barley is annually cut green for fodder.

Such professors as are at this moment, in almost every newspaper in the country, -- scientific journals among the number, -- abusing and ridiculing the poor farmer for destroying the birds that destroy his grain; and telling him, if he were to let the birds alone, they would eat the insects that commit far greater devastation on his precious _cerealia_!

The phosphoric acid of the phosphate of lime, indispensable to the cerealia and other vegetables in the formation of their seeds, is separated as an excrement, in great quantities, by the rind and barks of ligneous plants.